Sunday 30 March 2014

More metaverse and Death

Part two: The approach of digital humans

Last week, I considered what the technical challenges are to creating digital scans of human brains in order that deceased people might be ‘resurrected’ in a virtual world – an idea which forms the setting for my upcoming novel, Beside an Open Window.  But what would existence be like for these resurrected brains? What would they do? What would it be like to live in a digital world and only be able to look back into the real one, as though through a window?



In Beside an Open Window, the metaverse of sixty years from now is envisaged as a wholly photorealistic environment that looks indistinguishable from the real world.  Given the pace of computer graphics development over the last few years, this part of the proposition seems very uncontroversial; indeed, the gold-rush on virtual reality technology that appears to be in play right now – with Facebook the latest large company to jump on this particular bandwagon in its acquisition of the Oculus Rift – would suggest that visual immersion is considered the new holy grail of online interaction.

All well and good if you’re a flesh-and-blood human only looking in on a virtual world, but if that world is the only thing that exists for you then you’re going to need more than just visual stimulation in order to feel anything approaching complete.  As I mentioned previously, our brains receive input from the external and internal world far more complex than the notion of ‘five senses’ would suggest.  We might consider the notion of ‘touch’ to be straightforward, for example, but is not the experience of sensing temperature through our skin qualitatively different from the sensation of sensing a surface to see if it is rough or smooth?  Also, how would you describe sensations such as a full stomach or a headache in such terms?

In Beside an Open Window, digital humans (I read a fascinating article recently by GeorgeDvorsky, in which he discusses futurist Robin Hanson’s thinking on the subject; Hanson refers to digital humans as brain emulations, or ‘ems’) can see and hear, they can feel surface texture and pressure, and they have the sense of proprioception that enables them to move about in a co-ordinated fashion (that’s the sense that enabled you to detect when your finger was almost at your nose in last week’s article).  They have no sense of taste or smell, however – eating and drinking is not possible – and are unable to sense temperature.  They also have no internal senses so they can no longer feel any sort of internal discomfort such as indigestion or muscle fatigue, nor internal pleasure such as feeling (mildly) drunk or the sensation of orgasm.

This might seem like a small price to pay for an indefinitely extended existence, but it’s important to consider just how fundamental these sensations are to the experience of being human.  Such activities as eating, drinking and having sex might ultimately only occupy a small portion of our total existence time, but our internal sensations are constantly with us and form a huge part of our mental state on a moment-by-moment basis.  What would anxiety feel like, for example, without a rapidly beating heart or a knot in the stomach?  What would relaxation feel like without that sense of your body being in a state of comfortable balance?  How would you know what mood you were in without these associated physiological sensations learned over a lifetime of real-life existence?  Would you even experience different moods any more?  The approach I take in Beside an Open Window is to assume that the brain projects a ‘phantom body’ in the same way that amputees experience phantom limbs, that specific neural outputs to the body have become so conditioned to the associated neural inputs that the outputs now trigger the inputs even though there is no longer a body attached to them (in other words, the mental component of anxiety is so commonly associated with the physiological component that the one triggers the neural inputs of the other).  This is pure speculation on my part and might not be even remotely true.  Life in the total absence of internal sensation might ultimately be completely intolerable.

But the brain is uniquely flexible in its ability to adapt to new environments and might just surprise us.  Assuming we are able to adapt in this way, then, what might we do in the metaverse once we’re there posthumously and, in particular, how would we make money?  Whilst life in the metaverse might be cheaper than in the real world, with no food and utility costs to cover, that’s not to say there won’t be any costs at all.  You’ll still have a carbon footprint that will need to be paid for and the price of virtual land might get pushed up if everyone wants the mansion of their dreams to live in.  You might also have dependents back in the real world to look after.

Whatever metaversian job opportunities exist, there will also be plenty of jobs that deceased, digital humans (DDHs) could be capable of back in the real world.  There’s no reason why secretaries and personal assistants couldn’t be DDHs; programmers could be DDHs, lawyers and accountants could be DDHs, IT support could be DDHs (no great change there).  Elements of teaching and medicine could be carried out by DDHs.  Sales and customer service departments for large corporations – the future equivalent of today’s call centres – could be staffed in their entirety by DDHs.  Only the jobs that require people to go outside and manipulate physical things – tradespeople, nurses, front line police, etc – would be safe from DDH competition, though their managers might not be.  And you thought automation and immigration were the biggest threat to your jobs.

DDHs won’t only be attractive to real life employers because they’ll cost less, they’ll also be attractive because they’ll be faster.  There’s no reason why an emulated brain couldn’t be sped up significantly for all or part of its existence.  Programmers, for example, could be run at many times their normal speed so that more work can be done in less time – an attractive option for the programmers themselves if they can switch in and out of speeded up time without noticing anything different themselves (an arrangement could be made, for example, where workers turn up on the hour, do what feels to them like a full day’s work and then finish an hour later in real time with more or less a whole twenty-four hours off before their next shift starts).  Or you could take a bunch of world-class scientists, speed them up a thousand times and then give them fifty years in a sealed-up metaverse to solve humanity’s problems.

The question is likely to arise, naturally, on what sort of rights DDHs have.  Would they be recognised as living in their own right?  Would they get the vote in real world elections (would they have their own representatives in government)?  Would the intentional deletion of a brain scan be regarded in the same manner as murder?  Could two DDHs get married?  Could a DDH get married to a living human being?  If a person is married to someone in real life before they die, is it the assumption that they remain married once activated as a DDH?  What if the brain scan was created before the couple met?

If someone dies because of an accident they caused and in which other people also died, would some sort of sentencing need to be carried out against the DDH on its activation, even though its scan was created before the incident (potentially, years before)?  What would a metaverse prison look like?  If a murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment in real life, could there also be a digital life component to their sentence so that a thousand years really does mean a thousand years?

There might be the temptation to activate your brain scan in the metaverse before you die in real life and put it to work whilst you enjoy the qualities of the physical world – they won’t, after all, be there for you forever.  Would this make DDHs slaves?  Would there be legislation against such activity?  More generally, how would people get along with the digital replicas of themselves?  Which of the two of you would be regarded as the most authentic ‘you’?  Would you both be partnered to the same person if the copy was made and activated whilst you were in a relationship?

What if you someone activated two copies of their brain in the metaverse instead of one?  Or three copies.  Or a hundred.  What if someone made an illegal copy of a scan and put it to use in some way?

As you can see, the issues are endless; there are many more beyond this mere handful and I am fascinated by them all… which is why I wrote Beside an Open Window.  To see which of them I explore and to what end you will, of course, have to read the novel.  Next weekend, however, as a precursor to the release of Beside an Open Window later in April, I’ll be publishing here a complete chapter from the book that works as a stand-alone short story and which considers digital life from the perspective of a recently deceased husband and father, and also ponders what it would be like to attend your own funeral.

Sunday 23 March 2014

Metaverse and Death

Part one: Will copies of human beings one day end up in the metaverse?

In my upcoming novel, Beside an Open Window, human beings make regular digital scans of their brains while alive so that these can be activated in a vast online world once they die. The book is set sixty years into the future and ‘dead residents’ interact in this world with living residents who access it in much the same way as we do Second Life® today.

Glass brain, the latest output from Philip Rosedale

The idea of creating brain scans is one I’ve been thinking about for several years. Some time before SL existed, I remember wondering if it might one day be possible to create ‘archived’ copies of brains on computers. It was less an issue to me at the time that we might do so in order to extend in some way human existence and much more that we might do this to prevent the loss of people’s thoughts and memories. I think this had a lot to do with the death of my father, who I missed profoundly and whose thinking and experiences I considered a genuine loss to his fields of interest.

When I got into SL, the idea that such archives might connect to the metaverse – and thereby have natural movement in a virtual world – was very compelling to me. I hadn’t put a great deal of thought previously into how digital brains might interact with the world, oscillating broadly between a very basic ‘brain-in-a-jar’ scenario where an archive was switched on periodically for electronic consultation and the full-blown (and, frankly, unlikely) ‘holodeck’ notion promoted in Star Trek. Somewhere in the middle of all that I’d also thought fleetingly about uploading brain scans to robots – an idea I later discovered was explored by Janet Asimov in her novel, ‘Mind Transfer’.

In a virtual world, however, a brain could roam about with freedom in a virtual body and consume only a fraction of the energy and costs of any robot or far-fetched holodeck idea.

Could such a thing, then, actually be possible? There are a few conditions which would have to be met. Firstly, it would have to be possible to scan a brain at a resolution able to identify individual molecules. Memory is stored via pathways through different neurons, the route that an individual signal takes through them being determined by the quantities of neurotransmitter chemicals passing across the tiny gap between one neuron and the next – the synapse – and the receptiveness of the receiving neurons to these chemicals. Only by knowing the exact state of all of this could we create a scan that was in any way functional. No such technology exists today, although the resolution of brain scanning is continually improving. By interesting coincidence, one recent innovation allowing users to scan and view their brain activity in real-time – ‘Glass Brain’ – has been co-developed by none other than SL’s own Philip Rosedale.

Secondly, we would need gigantic computer memory capacity for storing brain scans. One estimate I read recently was that there are something approaching 500 trillion trillion atoms in a human brain. Assuming this is true and assuming we assigned one byte of computer memory to the description of each atom, my back-of-an-envelope calculations indicate we would need something in the region of 50 trillion terabytes to store all this. Applying Moore’s Law to computer memory growth – starting at 8 gigabytes for a mid-price desktop system today – we might predict that the computers of 2064 will have memories in the region of 250,000 terabytes, which is rather a long way short of what we’d need. Add another sixty years of Moore’s Law progression, however, and you’re pretty much there.

Thirdly, we’d need to be able to bring these scans to life: their data would have to mean something to the computers they’re loaded into, just like a jpeg means something and an MP3 means something else. We’d need to understand the precise function of neurons and brain chemistry in order for this to happen, such that each neuron’s data description can be turned into a fully emulated brain cell once the model’s switched on and digital blood applied. We’d need to know how visual input is encoded in the eye and sent down the optic nerve if we want our dead people to see in the metaverse and how auditory input is encoded in the cochlea if we want them to hear. Sensory input, in fact, would be a huge area for further research: contrary to popular belief, the brain receives input far more complex than just ‘the five senses’. For example, shut your eyes and hold your hand at arm’s length, then move it towards your nose but stop just short of touching it: how did you know where your hand was in terms of what sight, sound, smell, taste or touch were telling you?

Even supposing we work out how to do all these things, however, there could still be another enormous barrier to emulating the mind: consciousness, without which a human brain is nothing. In Beside an Open Window the theory of consciousness as emergent behaviour is assumed. Emergent behaviours are apparently organised behaviours that emerge from the more simple behaviours of large collections of smaller organisms. The seemingly simultaneous movements of flocks of birds or shoals of fish – movements which give the impression of an organised whole rather than lots of disorganised individual components – are examples of this. In science fiction, the idea of higher order behaviours arising out of the more mundane work of component individuals is something that’s most famously been explored in Star Trek through the notion of the ‘hive mind’ of The Borg. Human consciousness as an emergent behaviour of neurons – ultimately, then, an illusion of sorts – is something that ‘just happens’… but would it happen also in a digitally modelled brain? That’s the sort of thing we can’t possible know until we actually try it out.

Supposing, then, that consciousness does happen, what would existence be like for these resurrected brains? What would they do? What would it be like to live in a digital world and only be able to look back into the real one, as though through a window? I’ll examine some of these issues in part two of this article next weekend.

Tuesday 18 March 2014

Coming soon: Beside an Open Window

As I announced last week, I'll soon be publishing a new novel, Beside an Open Window. This is a science fiction novel set sixty years into the future which takes place in a metaverse not entirely dissimilar to Second Life, except one of the key groups of residents in this world are people who have died in real life and uploaded to it a digital copy of their brain.


I say new; in fact, I wrote this book originally in 2009. Unlike my NaNoWriMo Second Life titles (which are written in a month), Beside an Open Window took me the best part of six months. I also read it through completely in SL - twice - to get listener feedback.  I think Beside an Open Window is the best thing I've ever written - which I say not to boast, but by means of an explanation as to why I haven't so far published it online.  My original plan was to get it published 'traditionally'.  Well, I sent it to a couple of agents and you can probably guess what happened.

So I let it gather virtual dust, always meaning to get around to send it off to someone new and not quite achieving this (ie, not achieving it at all).  I decided to read it through again in January (whilst I waited for my draft copy of 'AFK, Indefinitely' to arrive).  Not having looked at it for the best part of three years turned me into a far more critical reader of my own work than I would otherwise have managed and I decided it needed a major edit.  The first half of the book in particular contained some really lazy passages and I spent about a fortnight cutting these down and rewriting them, in the end reducing the novel length by over a thousand words.  I'm now really happy with the final version.

A lot has happened in the publishing world since 2009, not least of which is the rise of the Kindle ebook. I've decided, therefore, that I'm going to publish BAOW exclusively to Kindle in the first instance, taking advantage of their 'KDP Select' programme.  This will mean a higher price than my normal Kindle books ($2.99 is the minimum price on KDP Select), but will also enable me to give it away for free for up to five days.  I'll use up the first couple of those days when I announce publication and keep the rest back for future promotions.  If you're a Kindle owner, therefore (and that includes all Android and Apple tablet users, who can download a free Kindle app for their device), keep an eye out for the publication date if you would like a free copy of the novel.

To warm you up (and whilst I get to work actually preparing the Kindle version), I'll be publishing a couple of articles over the next couple of weeks exploring some of the issues raised by the novel.  'Metaverse and Death' will be the first of these, which I'll publish this coming weekend.  Enjoy!

Video above by Tom Scott.

Wednesday 12 March 2014

Ticking off the To-Dos



I'm working my way gradually through my list of 2014 stuff to get done from this post.

'AFK, Indefinitely' is now released and has had its first - five star - review on Amazon.com (which I'm very grateful for).

I also launched (quietly) last month my new website for my 'HHax' range of 60s and 70s furniture and electricals, which you can visit via the new 'HHax' tab in the menu bar of this page. In addition to product-related posts, I plan on flooding this with associated memorabilia (advertisements, brochures, photographs, packaging, and so on), the principle reason for this being that I just plain adore it all and have been looking for an excuse to post stuff like this for ages.

Thank you so much to the 300 plus readers of my "Second life of Second Life" article.  I wasn't certain how many readers a new SL article would attract now that AVENUE is on its hiatus, so this was a very pleasant surprise indeed.

I'll soon be turning my attention back to 'SIM', the novella I mentioned in January. In the meantime, however, I've decided to release finally online my novel 'Beside an Open Window', which I wrote in 2009.  I'll post more news on this shortly.